Conflict (Prouty)/Book 4/Chapter 2
All that fall and winter whenever Roger Dallinger called at the apartment to leave a book for Sheilah he thought she might like, or inquire for the children during the four weeks when one after another each had an attack of influenza, and bring them some flowers, or a game, or a picture-puzzle; or, as he became acquainted with Felix, to present the work-bench in the dining-room with some new labor-saving device, he always left in Sheilah's heart that same strange feeling of singing—that same strange quivering sense of joy that expressed itself in a passionate desire on her part to be kinder and more generous to the children, kinder and more generous to Felix.
Although sometimes Roger stayed less than ten minutes, and often there was no chance to talk to him uninterruptedly and alone (the children came to delight in his society), still always it was as if he had lit a candle in her life that shed a warm rosy glow over all the plain homely details for hours afterward. Oh, surely his coming was right, was good! Surely Dr. Baird would approve. He made her a better mother, a better wife. Enriched her. Became a hidden source of vitality and beauty to her, so that she was able to give more abundantly to those for whose happiness she was responsible. Like a buried spring, hidden in the side of a mountain, enriching the soil from beneath, secretly and silently feeding the roots of rare and lovely flowers that starred the mossy bank.
She told him so one late afternoon in January, in her characteristic, indirect way, likening him to the buried spring (they still talked in similes sometimes), pursuing her shy, unformed thought slowly, gropingly, as he sat and listened silently across the room, turning his eyes away from her finally, partaking cautiously, sparingly, of the dainty food she offered him, afraid his hunger might burst out in some ravenous and greedy act.
This was the first time she had referred to their friendship (if that was the name for it), and its significance to her. As he listened he felt fully repaid for all his restraint. He wished only for the privilege of seeing Sheilah occasionally, and taking part in making her happy. And she was telling him that he was succeeding! Well—he would continue to succeed. He would make of their relations one of those ideal friendships Carl Baird talked about, controlled and governed by intelligence. Doing good to each other, helping each other, never stooping to the instinctive. Why, it could go on forever, if only—if only he didn't think of her eyes, or her hair, or how her lips had felt that night, or would feel, if . . . They were curved now in one of her kindest smiles for him, and her blue eyes were shrouded in a sort of soft gray mist as she said, 'When you first suggested coming to see me last fall, I was afraid it might make me less able to do my duty happily here, but it hasn't. It doesn't. I wanted to tell you so. You make the burdens I have to carry seem lighter.'
'That's all I want to do,' he said—he lied. He wanted terribly to take her in his arms!
It was far from his intention to do so, however. All winter he maintained his relationship to Sheilah as safe and wise friend—as safe and wise professional advisor. For thus he became; as her lawyer, looking over the property left her by her mother, and reinvesting it for her; discovering among the slender packet of papers certain securities once given her father, which Sheilah had been told were worthless; and to her amazement turning them into a source of steady income for her. Not much. A few hundred dollars a year, but enough to insure boarding-school later for Roddie as well as for Laetitia. Cicely was helping with Laetitia. Cicely had sailed for Europe just before Christmas, but her generous check for Laetitia had arrived before she left. Roger had taken charge of it, and invested it so favorably, that it threatened to double itself before ever Laetitia entered the school, laughingly he told Sheilah one day.
It became a source of constant joy to Roger to be able to help Sheilah a little materially. He wished it might be more. But he mustn't arouse her suspicions. She would never take money from him, even as a loan. She wasn't suspicious in the least, and as long as he kept his hands off her, he considered his deception perfectly ethical. But one night his hands strayed—his arms too. It wasn't premeditated. It just happened. Perhaps it had to happen.
It was after the theater one night in late March. He had never taken Sheilah to the theater before. There was a play that came to town which he wanted her to see, and to see with him. There was a beautiful moonlight scene in it between two lovers. Roger asked Felix too. They all went together.
Roger fully expected to say good-night to Sheilah at the door of the waiting Ford outside the theater. But the Ford wouldn't start. Felix didn't know what the matter was with the car. He couldn't say how long it would take him to fix it. It was late and raining. The result was, Roger took Sheilah home in his car which was just around the corner.
He was terribly conscious of her, seated in the low seat of the car beside him, the rain-splashed windshield shutting them away, alone. He had been terribly conscious of her all the evening. He had been feeling the sweetness of the nearness of her for two hours and a half, in the darkened theater. And she, too, had been feeling the sweetness of the nearness of him! When the car had left the crowded thoroughfares, and was purring along the dark, shadowed parkway that led to the street where Sheilah lived, suddenly, impulsively, Roger reached out one hand, guiding the car with the other, and placed it palm upwards on Sheilah's knee. She glanced down at it an instant, and then as naturally as she would have returned his smile, placed her own in it. It was enough. He grasped that quick, spontaneous response of hers eagerly. And thus they sat till they reached Sheilah's door, something running between them, through their clasped hands, that robbed them of the power of speech, that likewise seemed to rob them of the power to loosen their grasp.
The lights in the hall of the apartment were always put out at eleven o'clock. It was wrapped in the pitch blackness of the third-floor hall, just outside the door of the muslin-curtained front room, that Roger touched again the edge of the wine-cup. And this time he drank!
He did not know at the time whether or not Sheilah drank too. It was later in his room, as he rehearsed the dizzy scene, and every detail of it—where they had stood, in what position, and every slight change and shift of that position, that he recalled the pressure of her hands on his arms, not pushing him away, but clinging! The memory of them kept recurring to him over and over again, and each time with sharper, keener sweetness. For clinging hands tell more than defenceless lips.
Sheilah didn't know that she had told Roger anything. She didn't know that she had anything to tell him. She was as unaware, at first, of the serious thing that had happened to her as she had been of her clinging hands.
After he left her in the dark hall on the threshold of the front room, she went in and ctosed the door softly on his receding footsteps, mechanically turning on the light and going to her room to take off her things, too stunned to think or feel anything; performing the mechanical acts of undressing and getting into bed in a state of sort of mental and emotional numbness. It wasn't until she woke near morning sometime, that she began to feel and to suffer. Remorse and self-disillusionment crowded out all the joy that might have been hers—that would have been hers, had she been free, either from Felix, or from her merciless conscience.
Of what sort of clay was she made? She was a married woman, and a man not her husband had held her in his arms and kissed her! Not once, but twice—three times! And she had let him! She had wanted him to! Why, such a woman was unfit to be the guide of a daughter, was unfit to be the honored mother of a son, was unfit to be the trusted wife of any faithful man. Felix, six feet away, in the bed beside her, lay asleep and unaware, as confident in her goodness as she was in his. She had looked down upon Felix once. She had been ashamed of him. But now it was herself she was ashamed of—herself she looked down upon. Well—it should never happen again. She would see to it that Roger never—never touched her again.
Futile, useless resolve. There was Roger to deal with. Her clinging hands had told him something he wanted terribly to have them tell him again. And they did, a brief fortnight later! And afterward occurred the same numbness, the same remorse, the same resolves, the same slowly increasing longing in her every day he was absent to see him again—to feel him again, and the same giving-in. The gentle candlelight he had been in her life became a threatening fire finally that she fought day and night. The hidden spring broke through the surface at last, and became a swift, eager, rushing stream, she desperately tried to push back into the mountain's side and bury again. For a little while apparently everything went on the same. Roger dropped in at the apartment as casually as before and left as casually, frequently not seeing Sheilah alone, frequently not seeing her at all, purposely coming sometimes when she was out, to talk to Felix or the children, not to deceive them, but because they were part of her whom he so adored. When Roger and Sheilah were together, however, every moment was vital, every glance a caress, every touch an embrace. At first they did not acknowledge in words that there existed anything serious between them, but they saw the outline of it growing clearer and more palpable each time they met, like a ghost slowly coming alive,—a ghost which Roger well knew was unwelcome to Sheilah, but which she could not resist.
How he loved her for not being able to resist it, deploring the while that it should cause her unhappiness—that anything connected with him should cause her unhappiness. He realized that a clandestine relationship, even as restrained as he intended to keep theirs, must entail suffering for a sensitive woman, and for a while he considered disappearing out of her life altogether, and save her from that suffering. But that would be a cruel thing to do. She depended upon him already, and looked to him for reassurance and protection, not desertion in this new, startling experience. It seemed to him kinder to stand by, calm her fears, allay her misgivings, accustom her gently and gradually to a state of affairs not unusual in the life of many a good woman who has discovered too late the man with whom she could have been happy. Denied the closest relationship with him, she often accepts the makeshift of a rare and beautiful friendship.
Sheilah was a New-Englander and a Puritan. Another man less fine, less acute than Roger would: have been unable to carry on such a delicate relationship with such a woman even for a little while. But Roger, too, was a New-Englander and a Puritan. Moreover, he loved Sheilah. His love for her gave him an insight into her reactions that his regard for other women (as, for instance, for Cicely whom he always had so unwittingly hurt) had never awakened. He thought, felt, and suffered with Sheilah constantly, and anticipated and guarded and protected her constantly.
He knew, for instance, how subterfuge and any specific underhand act of deceit would fill her with remorse and self-reproach. Never did he ask her to meet him alone by appointment outside the apartment. Only twice did he take her out in the open green country they both loved so, in his car. For the second time she had had to deceive Laetitia, her own daughter, as to where she had been, and it had scorched and seared her for days afterward. He saw her, therefore, only at the apartment, going more and more frequently in the early afternoon before the children had come home from school.
At first he tried to resist caresses altogether, for he knew how high a price a woman like Sheilah must pay for them if stolen. But not succeeding completely he made her feel how precious they were to him, and how much more precious than as if she were free to respond openly, at no sacrifice of her code of honor. He never partook of a caress, even a light caress, lightly, and was never gay nor flippant afterward, but quiet and awed, as if he had just received a sacrament of some sort, and his soul, not his body alone, was stirred. So because her love was so reverenced, and every little sign and symbol of it so highly valued, gradually Sheilah's early sense of shame that had dulled her elation like tarnish, disappeared under Roger's constant tending and care, and was slowly persuaded into a glowing sense of pride.
With the same insight Roger also foresaw another fear that might arise due to the galling fact that she was a woman in hiding, unacknowledged, unrecognized, whom he could not marry. It would not be strange if she wondered sometimes what more she was to him than merely a woman he wished to kiss. He proved to her what more she was to him. He proved it beyond all shadow of doubt, and without delay. After that first kiss in the dark outside the little front room, Roger told Sheilah all there was to tell about himself during the years before she knew him, and asked her to ask him all there was to ask, which is more convincing to a woman than any declaration.
She alone of all women he crowned with the honor of his confidences, keeping no secrets from her, nothing hidden, gradually opening all the sealed jars of his past, and pouring the ashes, sacred and otherwise, of all his deeds, good and bad, into her hands, into her keeping. She, thus persuaded, thus convinced, likewise opened her sealed jars, poured out the ashes of her past deeds, of her past hopes, disappointments and suppressions, into Roger's hands, into Roger's keeping.
They approached nearer absolute honesty with each other than is often reached by two human beings. Because they must constantly starve the flame of love between them, they added fuel all the more extravagantly to the fire which was allowed, and for a little while their spirits became molten into one over the white coals of truth. Oh, if they only hadn't possessed bodies.